Increase in Combined-Salary Couples

Without them, the good life would be out of reach for millions of American families. With their help, families that otherwise would be struggling to make ends meet are enjoying $100,000 homes, $12,000 cars and $5,000 European vacations. Expensive department stores and exclusive restaurants count on their business. They are part of the reason for the upsurge in private school enrollment and the boom in real estate investment. Remove them from the picture and a sizable portion of the nation's buying power would disappear.

They are working wives, and today there are over 20 million of them in this country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Two-income families constitute an increasingly powerful economic group. Working husbands and wives are generally young, well-educated, career-oriented and free-spending. There are 18.7 million working couples nationwide, and nearly one-fourth of them are between the ages of 24 and 34. Families with two wage earners working full- or part-time had an annual median income of $21,064 in 1978, or $6,037 above that of single-earner households.

With 49 percent of all married women now working, wives who stay home soon may become as unusual as women who worked in offices and factories once were. Last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 58 percent of the women with school-age children were working; 41 percent of the mothers with children too young to attend school also had jobs. Columbia University sociologist Eli Ginzberg has called the employment of women outside the home the most important social change of the 20th century. “But its long-term implications,” he added, “are absolutely uncharitable. It will affect women, men and children, and the cumulative consequences of that will only be revealed in the 21st and 22nd centuries.”